Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Zweig writes about anti-poverty research, highlighting an MIT study that showed intervention methods can be effective at alleviating poverty. Prof. Esther Duflo says that, “We are trying to promote a culture of learning that will permeate governments and NGOs and businesses to such an extent that it will become par for the course.”
Nico Pitney writes for The Huffington Post about GiveDirectly, a charity founded by MIT graduate students that has found success combating poverty by providing direct cash transfers to low-income households in the developing world: “Supporters believe that cash transfers should now be the standard against which the usefulness of other programs are measured,” Pitney explains.
Tina Rosenberg writes for The New York Times about a study by J-PAL researchers examining the effectiveness of a poverty intervention program. Researchers found that participants in the program, “ate more, were more certain about access to food, held more assets, had more income and savings, spent more time working, and enjoyed better mental and physical health.”
A new study by MIT researchers has found that anti-poverty intervention methods can be effective, reports Carolyn Johnson for The Boston Globe. Interventions resulted in “fewer skipped meals, more income from livestock and farming, and a durable, though small, increase in how much they consume each day.”
Professor Esther Duflo has been awarded Spain's Princess of Asturias social science prize for her work studying poverty in developing countries, the Associated Press reports. The organizers of the prize said that Duflo has “profoundly changed strategies for education, health and employment in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
Alison Gopnik of The Wall Street Journal writes that new research by Professor John Gabrieli indicates that poverty can have a negative impact on brain development in children. The researchers found that “low-income children had developed thinner cortices than the high-income children.”
Ami Albernaz reports for The Boston Globe on a new study co-authored by Prof. John Gabrieli that finds that income disparity affects brain development in children. “The findings add a biological perspective on what it means to come from a lower socioeconomic background,” says Gabrieli.
Research by Prof. John Gabrieli demonstrates that poverty can have a negative impact on the adolescent brain, writes Brooks Hays for UPI. “When researchers at MIT scanned the brains of some 54 students, they found high-income students (in comparison with lower-income peers) have thicker cortex tissue in areas of the brain linked with visual perception and knowledge acquisition,” Hays writes.
A team of MIT researchers has found that the brain’s cortical thickness differs between low-income and high-income teenagers, reports Lyndsey Layton for The Washington Post. “The thing that really stands out is how powerful the economic influences are on something as fundamental as brain structure,” said Prof. John Gabrieli.
Martin Sandbu writes for the Financial Times about a report published by MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) that questioned the effectiveness of microfinancing programs in the developing world. "Microcredit access did not lead to substantial increases in income," the report found.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has been named to Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History. Bloomberg’s Mark Littman explains that J-PAL has “changed the way economists approach development issues.”
Professor Andrea Louise Campbell writes for Time about how government healthcare policy has forced her brother and sister-in-law into poverty in order to qualify for long-term care. Campbell argues that the solution for her family and others in the same situation is “[a] universal social insurance program for long-term care.”
Shawn Donnan of the Financial Times writes about a new MIT study examining gossip. Prof. Abhijit Banerjee explains that the study shows, “your sense of who is the office gossip is generally very good and that if you want to spread information you should do it by that person.”
Krissy Clark of NPR reports on Professor Amy Glasmeier’s work developing the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Clark reports that through examining the cost of living, Glasmeier found that areas with higher poverty rates tended to have higher amounts of minimum wage jobs where the minimum wage, “absolutely was not paying people enough to live on.”
In a piece for The Huffington Post about the problems associated with defining a poverty threshold, Murtaza Haider, an associate professor of management at Ryerson University, highlights Prof. Abhijit Banerjee and Prof. Esther Duflo’s book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.